21 Comments:

"If individuals can take from a common pot regardless of how much they put in it..."

The key words being, "if" and "regardless".

There is no doubt that a corporation of farmers, properly organized, and capitalized, and using the correct divison of labour could not produce yet more corn than the same group organized as individuals.

What you had here was a failure of organization and management as much as a failure of government.

The type of ORGANIZATION is secondary to the type of INCENTIVE. Individuals can and do often voluntarily come together to form different organizations -- partnerships, co-ops, associations, corporations, etc.

But if there is little economic incentive to improve one's lot coupled with adverse consequences for slacking off, any such organization of human beings will likely fail -- or at least be far less productive than an could be.

As the Soviet saying went -- "We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us."

Of course organizations can fail or succeed, but organizations can still organize in a way that Makes the individual members better off. We may not even agree with what an organization is doing, but it is a mistake to confuse that with it being a bad organization.

The moral of stossels story seems to be about the supremacy of individual effort, but we know from simple observation that isn't the case. No one ever launched a satellite by themselves.

Rider is correct, incentive is important. But how many here are employed in successful organizations, are not paid overtime for extra output, and are rewarded once a year according to a scheme that has very little connection to performance, either ours or the company? When you get wheeled in for emergency heart surgery, how much will you know about your surgeons skill, let alone his incentive? And what is the incentive for those Democrats who have so skillfully dismantled a few states?

"The moral of stossels story seems to be about the supremacy of individual effort, but we know from simple observation that isn't the case. No one ever launched a satellite by themselves."

No, Hydra, the moral of Stossel's story seems to be about the "tragedy of the commons", and the superiority of individual property rights - a concept you don't understand, and continually display your ignorance of.

An individual working for their own benefit, and responsible for their own well being, will outperform an individual working for the common good, whose well being is provided by the group. Period. This is human nature, and no matter how badly you wish it were different, it just ain't so.

You seem to think that human nature can be corrected or restrained by more government regulation, but there's no evidence for this, and much evidence that just the opposite is true. Pull your head out and look around you. Try hard to understand what you are seeing and reading. Think, man!

What Stossel is writing about is the continued and consistent failure of collectivism, and the continued and consistent success of entrepreneurism and indiviudal incentives.

It is not clear from your comment if you understand that collectivism doesn't work. You seem to be brushing off the consistent failure of collectivism as a simple "failure of organization and management". Is that what you are meaning?

"Beyond that superlative percormance by all individuals is routinely outpaced by their collective performance as corporations."

Hydra, this is more of your nonsense. What does this even mean? Are you using inexpensive language translation software to produce this babble?

You haven't answered Jet Beagle's question. Did you not understand it, or are you just ignoring it?

You continue to confuse the concept of a collective social or economic system with the concept of a corporation. They are not the same, and it's hard to believe you don't understand that. I can only conclude that you are being willfully obtuse.

Your continued assertion that a collective is superior to entrepreneurship and individual incentives is pathetic. You have presented no rational argument and no empirical support for the idea, when in fact, there is evidence all around that exactly the opposite is true.

You consider the tyrannical system in Cuba to be a success? The mind boggles. What could your measure of success possibly be, the mere fact that it still exists? Some people might base the success of a particular regime on the well being of its citizens. In that light, Cuba is a dismal failure. If you don't think so, ask yourself why those happy Cubans would so often risk being eaten alive by sharks to leave those blissful shores to get to Florida.